New ideas. Like ’em or loathe ’em?

Here are four new ways of doing things – how hide electricity pylons, how to pay for medicare, how to get building materials up to roof level and – most importantly – how to store beer.

1. Hiding those ugly pylons. Dominic Wilcox at the Variations on Normal  blog has come up with an answer to two difficult questions at once – what to do with landfill? And how to beautify electricity pylons?

His cheaper alternative is to simply rename pylons, Mini Eiffel Towers and the public will adore them, maybe even pay to go up them

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It’s all here – cheese, politics, a Gandhi joke and the best headline of all time

Thanks to Virus Comix for the cheese.

Politics time now.

This is not about rights and wrongs – but analysis of the raw data. In the US mid term elections, who swung the most from the Democrats to the Republicans? Kevin Drum at Mother Jones has this to say:

First things first: In 2006 Democrats won the popular vote for the House of Representatives by about 8 points. In 2010, Republicans won the popular vote by about 6 points. That’s a shift of 14 points. There are plenty of broad structural explanations for this—the economy, dislike of health care reform, whatever—but beyond that, we’d also like to know if there were any specific groups that helped power this Republican victory. Was it the youth vote? The evangelicals? What?

To find out, you have to look for groups that swung by substantially more or less than 14 points. So here they are. Based on a comparison of 2006 and 2010 exit polls, here are the demographic groups that showed the biggest swing into the Republican column this year:

• Nonvoters from 2008 (+56)